Monday, 22 October 2007

Past Tenses: How to Use The Perfect

The perfect tense is one of three German past tense forms. It's also the one that's most commonly used in spoken German, so very useful to learn. The perfect tense is a compound tense. This means it uses two verbs: an auxiliary (or helper) verb and a main verb. Most of the time, the auxiliary verb is haben, which means to have. But for some verbs, especially intransitive verbs of motion and intransitive change-of-state verbs, the auxiliary verb is sein, which means to be. The main verb then shoots along to the end of the clause and appears in the form of a past participle. As a rule of thumb, you create the past participle of a verb from its infinitive by adding a ge- on the beginning, and sometimes you switch the or the on the end for a . Two examples of how you make a perfect tense sentence are:

7 comments:

jonny
said...

Hi Laura!

Just thought I'd drop by and congratulate you for your brilliant podcasts! I've been listening for a few months now (I noticed your mention in LinguaSIG!!)

Anyway, I'm doing an A Level in German, and have applied to do it at uni! So hopefully I'll be having the wonderful experiences that you've had one day!! It helps that I find the German grammar particularly fascinating.

There are a couple of things that I'd love for you to help with, if you can squeeze them in. Firstly, what's the difference between 'machen' and 'tun'? I know set expressions will use one, such as 'mein Kopf tut weh', usw. but apart from that, are they pretty much interchangeable?

Also, the subjunctive! I've not gone into it in too much detail before, but I need to know it!

Thanks once again for these podcasts. I feel like a bit of a nerd enjoying German grammar as much as I do, but your podcasts are a well-structured and well thought out facility to accommodate my nerdishness!

Thank goodness for your podcasts. I am learning German after many years break from a couple years of it in college, and you are direct and clear in explaining concepts that I've been figuring out on my own. So good to have your reinforcement.

I've got a good link for a website on the whole machen and tun thing. I agree with everything they say about it (except they seem to have left out weh tun which means to hurt or to ache, as in mein Kopf tut weh - my head hurts/I've got a headache).

Anyhow, here's the link:

http://german.about.com/library/blconfus_machen.htm

In fact, the german.about.com site is pretty excellent in general. I haven't looked at it all, but I agree with almost everything I have seen so far, and on most topics I find their style of explanation really simple and to the point. Having said that, the reason I included caveats in that statement is that I'm not so keen on their explanation of the subjunctive. I prefer Wikipedia for that:

The conditional (subjunctive II) is on my list of topics to do after I've finished the past tense and had a bash at conjunctions and word order. It may take a while before I get around to subjunctive I (reported speech), because this is a lot less common; although it really all depends on the direction I find the podcast heading in when I start writing. It often surprises me what I end up deciding needs to be included.

I strongly recommend that you buy yourself a copy of Hammer's German Grammar & Usage. I've looked on Amazon and there seems to be a new edition out:http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hammers-German-Grammar-Martin-Durrell/dp/0340742291/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/026-0477026-8421233?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1193839235&sr=8-1but for some reason you can get the third edition a lot more cheaply in hardback:http://www.amazon.co.uk/German-Grammar-Usage-E-Hammer/dp/034061451X/ref=sr_1_5/026-0477026-8421233?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1193839235&sr=8-5

I think my own copy may even be a second edition (it's certainly not the most up-to-date one).

German grammar doesn't change much over the course of a few years (all languages are changing constantly, but the rate of change, particularly in grammar, is quite slow in most languages). On the other hand, our understanding of it can change in that period of time, so there may be some advantage in buying the latest edition. Also, if you know which university you're going to already, then it might pay to check with them if they use Hammer and which edition they use. Because if they give you page references to go with topics on their courses, then those will be specific to that edition and it's probably worth the extra few quid to have the edition with the matching page numbers.

If they don't use Hammer, I recommend you get a copy of it anyway, as it is fantastic on most topics and well worth having. I read the whole thing from beginning to end in my third year (not that I managed to remember half of it), and it makes a great reference book. I know I keep plugging it, but they don’t pay me to do it. I just really like the book.

I just wanted to drop by and say how much I appreciate your podcast. For some reason I always need to take a 'grammar based' approach to learning a language.. I need to think about why things go together the way they do and your podcast answers my questions nicely.

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About Me

I learnt German at school and hated it - no one wanted to explain the structures to me. Back then I thought that there couldn't be any structures in German, otherwise people would explain how they work to me to save me a lot of time and effort. So I gave up German.
Fortunately, I ended up doing my gap year in Germany, learning German in classes for foreigners, and then studying German at university. And finally, people wanted to teach me grammar.
I was lucky, I get grammar, it stuck in my head, and I graduated with a first class degree with distinction in the spoken and written language.
Since then, I've worked as a translation checker and a financial analyst with a focus on German-speaking regions, and I'm now a financial translator. I also had a brief go at teacher training, but quit, partly because 30 11-year-olds in a room really give me stage fright, but partly because teaching theory dictated that teachers focus on speaking and avoid teaching the interesting bit: the grammar. So now, I'm making German GrammarPod, to try and pass on the love and understanding of grammar, but without the bit where I need to stand up in front of 30 11-year-olds to deliver it.